The past few decades have witnessed a slowdown in productivity growth in many advanced economies, including Finland. Against this backdrop, this study investigates product switching in Finnish manufacturing firms during the period of 2009-2019. The findings indicate a growing trend towards...

China's manufacturing sector has been a key source of the economy's dynamism. Analysis after 2007 however is hampered by problems in the key data source for empirical analysis, the National Bureau of Statistics' (NBS) annual survey of industrial firms. Issues include missing information on value...

We use newly-available Indian panel data to estimate how the returns to planting-stage investments vary by rainfall realizations. We show that the forecasts significantly affect farmer investment decisions and that these responses account for a substantial fraction of the inter-annual...

This paper uses a long time series of German employment data to test the theory of Ngai & Pissarides (2007). The theory suggests that the shift of employment shares from manufacturing to services is due to divergent growth rates of total factor productivity (TFP) in the two sectors. To test the...

This paper uses a long time series of German employment data to test the theory of Ngai & Pissarides (2007). The theory suggests that the shift of employment shares from manufacturing to services is due to divergent growth rates of total factor productivity (TFP) in the two sectors. To test the...

Existing literature on economic growth and structural change relies on trade data to make pronouncements about a country's competitiveness and long-term growth prospects through the acquisition of capabilities. However, insufficient data give us a limited view of what is happening within the...

The large regional variation in minimum wage levels in the period 2002-08 in China implies that Chinese manufacturing firms experienced competitive shocks as a function of firm location and their low-wage employment share. We find that minimum wage hikes accelerate the input substitution from...

The Mexican economy experienced a shortage of natural gas from the second quarter of 2012 through the second half of 2013. In order to deal with this problem, the state-owned national supplier of natural gas (Pemex) implemented a system that restricts the amount of natural gas used by the...

Using a novel comprehensive data set of IT investment at the firm level, we find that a firm investing an additional euro in IT increases value added by 1 euro and 38 cents on average. This marginal product of IT investment increases with firm size and varies across sectors. IT explains about...